Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The world of Koa has been fairly quiet for ages now, but the last few weeks have brought some important progress (starting on our honeymoon, on Sant'Erasmo). Here goes:

1) For the last time, w and y are not fated to be Koa phonemes. Just looking at the new words that contain them in my lexicon after a year and a half to sober up made this clear: sewe, yomo, wohi, yuhu, wene, uye, maya, yume, mawa, paye, weo, yaye and yoki are so obviously not Koa words. Somehow I have to remember this and not go through any more angst on this issue.

2) The genitive phrase, including for pronominal possession, is now formally always ka X Y, where Y is the possessor. There currently remains a little bit of wiggle room for phrases like ni mama, etc., but the jury's still out. In any event, responding to a question I asked several years ago, pronoun objects will certainly not be acceptable preverbally: *ni se loha, etc. It's not so bad, really -- ka talo ni has a certain elegance to it.

3) After much consideration, during which for a brief period I was leaning heavily towards a Hungarian-style "my X exists" structure, I've come to the conclusion that verbal possession needs to be via prepositional phrase, using either me or la (final decision pending). So, for example:

There are some unresolved questions about usage here, but in general I think this will work well. In the main, my concerns are about the negative/interrogative, and pertain to the existential construct in general -- I keep wanting to say something like na tai neko me ni, which is clearly in violation of everything everywhere. I think what's happening is the collision of the logical design of the language with human language intuition; hopefully they won't end up being too difficult to reconcile.

4) Speaking of which, I think I've finally got the specifier system figured out. A lot of it had to do with realizing that the hu/po predicate logic design isn't necessarily all that relevant to human linguistic needs; what I've done is to give that meaning to these particles in conjuction with an article, but to give them a more pragmatic/specifier-type when immediately preposed to a noun. Here, then, are all our current specifiers.

ka neko = the cat(s), refers to something already on the discourse stageti neko = a deictic subset of cats, either of those already on stage or a new set being raised to the stagea neko = a/some cat(s), refers to specific animals someone has in mind which are not yet onstage but are being raisedhu neko = a/some cat(s), nonspecific referents, with no intent to raise to the stagepo neko = cats in generalko neko = the abstract idea of being a cat: cathood, felinity, etc.na neko = no catke neko = what/which catni neko = my cat (optional shortening of ka neko ni)

Many of these can be be increased in specificity by adding a definite or indefinite article, as follows:

tika neko = (how does this differ from ti neko?)huka neko = one/some of the cats already onstage/in the given sethua neko = a/some cats, out of all the cats that existhuti neko = one/some of the cats in the deictically indicated setpoka neko = all of the cats onstage/in the given setpoa neko = every cat, periodpoti neko = all of the cats in the deictically indicated setnaka neko = none of the cats onstage/in the given setkeka neko = which of the cats onstage/in the given set? which of these cats?nika neko = this set of my cats, these particular cats of mine

In the same vein, all of these (and a few more with -a) also stand alone as pronouns:

tika = this one, these onestia = this [stuff, idea], all thishuka = one/some of them, someonehua = somethinghuti = one/some of thesepoka = all of them, everyonepoa = everythingpoti = all of thesenaka = none of them, no one (nahuka with same meaning)naa = nothing (nahua preferred?)keka = which one?kea = what?nika = mine, this one of mine

5) There's an unanswered question about ditransitive clauses. Where both the accusative and dative arguments are full nouns, they form what is formally a genitive phrase if listed in dative-accusative order with no preposition:

ni si ana ka mama a neko1SG=PERF=give DEF=mother INDEF=cat"I gave my mother a cat" or "I gave the mother of a certain cat [to someone]"

For this reason I was about to say that the dative-accusative order is only acceptable when the dative argument is pronominal, but then the ambiguity above isn't really pragmatically worrisome. For the moment I'm going to assume that context and animacy will nearly always resolve this, and leave both options open.

6) Negative clauses: how are they done? To answer an old question, for the moment I'd like to leave all the possibilities available. They all make sense, and the "double negative," while perhaps logically confusing, would never be pragmatically so. Therefore, "I didn't see anyone" could be translated in any of these ways:

ni si nae na(hu)kani na si nae hukani na si nae na(hu)ka7) A small but important matter: what is the word for "cat?" When I was in Europe I was feeling pleased with my choice of neko in homage to Japanese, but checking my dictionary a few weeks later I remembered that I already had a word for "cat," sene. I feel torn in my allegiance; we'll need to come back to this one.